One of the efforts the Mentors group has been focused on these last few weeks has been on this project of collecting news and other interesting items that would reflect the kinds of positive work being done in Second Life and other virtual worlds settings. The idea has been to then share this perspective with the world at large in order to help balance out the general image presented by popular media, which tends more often to focus on Second Life and virtual worlds as places for purely recreational gaming or which tends to take a perspective that perhaps highlights more potentially sensationalistic pursuits, like virtual sex.

So as part of this effort by the Mentors group over the last several weeks, I've been gathering items I thought were especially interesting from this standpoint to share. As I collected and began to study the items that caught my attention, I realized they were falling into three general categories for me...